LaPlaine Health Clinic & Paracetamol

Today we vistied a nearby town called LaPlaine where we interacted with the people in the health clinic.  I personally got to work the majority of the time in the pharmacy with RPh Kent.  Many shocking things I encountered that differs from the way we practice pharmacy in the States include: having to log every prescription by hand which included the quantity of the drug for reordering purposes, physically writing out a pharmacy label to put on a plastic bag where the drugs were being dispensed into, drugs can take up to 3 months to get when ordered, syringes for injecting insulin are given in quantities of 5 per month per individual in order to conserve the quite limited supply the island has so basically you are forced to reuse syringes, and a lot of prescriptions were forced to be changed to whatever the pharmacy had in stock.  Kent also gave us a tour of the clinic and included a maternity ward for emergency purporses, a counseling room for newly diagnosed HIV patients, and a room which included a refrigerator for storing the vaccines.  The most common disease states in Dominica included HTN, DM, mental illness and skin infections.  Kent said the majority of mental illness is from illegal drug use (marijuana and crack cocaine) and alcohol abuse.

A drug that Dominica has that I was unfamilar with was a drug called paracetamol.  After doing a little research I discovered that this drug is the same drug as our "acetaminophen".  Paracetamol comes from chemical names for the compound: para-acetylaminophenol and para-acetylaminophenol.  Paracetamol is also available at a strength of 500 mg, which is comparable to our acetaminophen strength.

-Anthony